5 comments:

I had to google TCK. Third Culture Kids, huh? "A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of [their] developmental years outside the parents' culture."Now, unless the parents are from different cultures, why is it called Third Culture Kid, instead of Second Culture Kid?

Apparently the idea is that the kids embody the third culture. But it's a pretty confusing term so I think some people use terms like trans-culture kid. I mean, if the parents are from two different cultures and the kid grows up in more than one other country, that's more than 3 anyway...so yes.

I'm still confused. Let's say my Parents were Japanese (which, I can assure they aren't), and they moved to Canada and had me, where does the third culturte come in? To me that still sounds like second culture.

According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, the sociologist who coined the term "describes the third culture as a shared, or interstitial way of life lived by those who had gone from one culture (the home or first culture) to a host culture (the second) and had developed their own shared way of life with others also living outside their passport cultures.Kay Eakin adapted this term and described a TCK as "someone who, as a child, has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than [their] own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture".

So apparently the "third culture" is a conglomerate of the kid's passport culture (Japan) and the culture surrounding them (Canada). But I agree the term could and should be changed (I think it was coined in the 50s?) because if that were the case, there'd be fourth, fifth, sixth, etc. culture kids all over the place depending on their parents' backgrounds and the number of places they grew up in.

But yeah...it's a term that's thrown around a lot in international school communities!